December 1, 2001

I'm working at the computer on the latter half of this blustery Saturday, and suddenly find that I have words clustering around you again. This tends to happen of late, and I've just decided to give in to the impulse, and see when, or if, it runs its course. So far, the pulse seems to have a distinctive 2+-day rhythm - curious - is it the moon moving through signs?

In my mind's eye and heart (and I think of the mind's body, distinct from the body's body - an imagined body, another parietal map that moves and touches and experiences things, too) I'm very aware of you. I can still see you exactly, at many different moments during that unexpected September night. I still feel your touch, and your hands, and the light sizzle under my feet.. There have been times in the last week when I've sensed you very tangibly nearby - it's a bit unnerving.

You say:

>The harmonic is mutual, as it could only be. (One doesn't experience such things alone.)

and I wonder if that harmonic extends to these sensations I'm still having. Does it, or is this a "me" thing?

You have so much texture for me, and I'm fascinated by that. Your texture gives you depth, and different facets of you that I've seen form this complex contour that - in a physics frame of reference - presents more surface for adhesion, and must maximize the connection and the bonding (or the feel of it, at least).

I apply labels to some of what I sense of you (and when I say "you", please know that it's my *sense* of you, ala that art-piece I wrote of in my first Tale, that I speak of and not the "you" defined by You - a You probably more interesting than I could begin to imagine, for most of us are.)

You feel like a Muse to me in that you inspire me to write, and to stretch, and to reach. You feel like a Mentor, for I've learned from and through you. You feel like a Brother from the Brotherhood, and a Friend - a Neighbor. You feel like a Citizen. And you very much feel like a Man to me.

I think the diversity of texture is a very good thing, and I like how many different places I sense in you.

In my story that I'm writing, the one that these Daily Tales continue to be a Voice exercise for, the tension between governmental ordering systems is expressed through types of molecular bonding. The existing status quo is what I call an Ionocracy. Its grouping strategy is to form ionic - taken and privately owned - bonds, while its counterpart supports Covalence, the sharing of ions necessary to complete one's outer shells. Water. Diamond. Covalent. One of the points is the strength in a working and deep diversity.

It's been a fun metaphor to build an E-volution around. I look forward to working on it again - my plan, of course, when the store sells and I'm free for the Next Big Thing.

*************

>I was startled at how dense the field of resonance became in one
>another's physical proximity.

Me, too. It was as though I entered a bubble when I first came up to you, and I don't remember leaving it until you kissed me good-night. I felt so held by you. I even feel held now.

I also think the density you allude to (..."destiny" spelled sideways, I now see, implying thicker and thinner Fates perhaps) is facilitated by the Web. The fact that this is how you and I are coming to know one another might make the resonant field appear/become stronger when we do actually physically see each other. I don't know.

I wonder what happens over time, with the movement in and out of virtual relationship - from ground to sky, a number of times - what is the amplitude of the wave that begins to stand up and be seen? What will it feel like? How do *you* experience this?

You said you had no idea where we would connect. I assume you meant that our space might be "here", at least for awhile, in this Noh Place of the virtual that synchronizes the handful of moments we're able to align with one another without requiring the work of bringing bodies or voices together in time (though I could imagine when this would be nice).

As I write, I think about de Chardin's Noosphere. I wonder if you and I - and so many other new friends sharing love and understandings in this way - are touching and coming to know one another in the space he described, arcing across the thousands of miles and decades of life's obstacles between us, to weave a net of even more special and unexpectedly novel genetic and memetic connections that, in their turn, become the intelligence that cycles in to regenerate the planet's balance?

When I was 16, in 1976, I was living in a small basement studio of a house in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I remember travelling into a very prescient state one wintery weekend, and I wrote about something connective, between minds and spirits, that I called "The Net". It seemed to me that it was a Salvation of sorts - a Cosmic Rescue - and the punch line was that you had to be willing to do it without The Net in order to get the safety of The Net.

****************

You've had a lot of experience examining the virtual - much more than I. I've read some of what you've written, and I think about it a bit as I question this complex of feelings - these resonants - around and within me that ring of you.

bell hooks interview (one of my favorites):

**

JPB: Much of what is critically ill in the American heart of the moment has to do with the confusion of information for experience, and reducing one's map of the world to the informational. We are removed from all of the intuitive realities because we're trying to experience them through this mediating and separating agency of television or the media in general. We're living in highly desocialized conditions in our hermetically-sealed two-level ranch-style suburban homes.

**

Because I've spent a lot of time in what I can only call an "imaginal" connection with you, in my less lucid, (few, and just a tad lonely) moments, where I want to hear someone in the bathroom brushing their teeth, soon to join me in bed, I contemplate the utility of imagining companionship and ask myself if this is what is "critically ill" in my own heart at present?

Am I confusing information for experience in this virtual relating to you? And is this "hermetically sealed" 3 level apartment building, with no family in sight for a thousand miles, any less de-socialized? (I could riff here, but I won't - would you still say these words today, or do you yet think the civilized can be saved?)

However, real or not, I find myself re-cognizing that this tapestry of dense emotion swirling around both yourself, and the grand missions of my life VIA this virtual web-place that seems both real and un-real, is obviously a learning tool that brings me closer to my own best next steps. If that's what it means to be deluded, I suppose I can live with that.

So, ensconced in the urbane and its concrete caves, I just have to put up The Good Fight when it comes to keeping my internal maps broadband

Several things are interesting about this hooks/barlow interview, not the least of which is the fact that you and bell seem to have been talking on the day you visited Maria's father, yes? - I think this must be true from the context I pick up - and you told me recently about how he (for I feel it was he) had told you to pay attention to the little things, and you are thinking about that now, as am I.

I find myself happy to have found this interview again, and now read it knowing even more fully how you must have been feeling that day, as you were talking to bell. What a serendipity.

Another serendipity: isn't *this* little thing - the fact that I can add to my knowledge about the world, and enhance my relationship to this sweet and virtual you, with little more than http://www.google.com, my curiosity about who you are, and the desire to connect (i.e, an organizational model and tool, and a heart's hunger) a breath of the prana of cyber-space that you also mentioned here?...

Speaking of, I suspect the heart is the greatest search-engine I've found. Give it the proper tools and it can find anything.

**************

Sometimes I hesitate to share these writings (surfing the vacuum takes fortitude) but these pages may be the only time I'll ever get to tell you these things, or even feel moved to write them. The muse can be fickle, as you know. You've said you enjoy, and it's only right to take a gentleman at his word.

I think it's both good and too rare when each of us knows how much the other truly thinks of us. I think too often the sincerest affinities may go unstated, for lack of courage, or waiting for a better day. How much healing of infant wounds - those wounds that you suggest terminate in the cultural cancer of self-loathing - could take place if we would just share these reinforcing thoughts of one another, with one another?

And finally, I don't know who you are as you're in the process of Living day to day, and I find myself wondering who the Daily John is. As I contemplate that, I become aware of parts of you that I don't know, and that I wish I did - the parts that I want face time with, to calibrate it with the rest of what I feel I know of you, and that core of Knowing that I'm certain of.

What are you wrestling with in your life right now? Are these the sorts of things that keep you from expressing yourself, or feeling deeply those catalytic things that might lead to Personal Change?

How are you?

love and curiousity,

cynthia

PLUR. Remember PLUR

Peace
Love
Unity
Respect

Peace
Lo

-- Anonymous, December 01, 2001